Disgruntled customers descended on the offices of Gazprom in Khasavyurt in the Russian republic of Dagestan recently to protest over the lack of gas being supplied to their homes by the state-controlled giant.

A video posted online by a ministerial department in the region showed the group, mostly women, kicking on the door of Gazprom’s subsidiary Mezhregiongaz Makhachkala to demand answers over the apparent lack of gas.

Although police tried to calm hundreds of disgruntled customers, they later sided with them in a social media post, calling the protest a showing of “righteous anger” and accusing the gas distributor of failing to establish dialogue with the community.

Earlier reports said that, despite an expected drop in outside temperature, supplies of gas to three settlements in the Khasavyurt region were halted at the beginning of October, with Mezhregiongaz Makhachkala failing to provide a credible explanation.

Gas is widely used as a primary fuel for home heating in Russia.

In recent years, Gazprom has repeatedly acknowledged issues with controlling the distribution of gas and the collection of customer payments in Dagestan and other regions in the south of Russia.

Earlier this year, a district court in the city of Grozny in the neighbouring Chechnya republic ordered a regional subsidiary of Gazprom to write off a debt of 9.3 billion roubles ($145 million) for gas consumed by private customers in the city in the period between 2007 and 2015.

That decision has been reversed after the ruling became a subject of heated discussion in other Russian regions where Gazprom has a stronger foothold.

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Gazprom feels the heat in Dagestan